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[...] Capital aims at lowering the price of wage labour (wages) and increasing the price of commodities in order to increase profits. Workers can refuse work in the form of strikes and thereby attack the wage mediation and money profit, and they can refuse or eliminate prices by trying to obtain use-values below market prices or for free (e.g., by refusing to buy certain products and producing them together with others). So money is not only a medium of circulation, but also a "mediator between the classes" [...] and an object of class struggle.
citing Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital politically (p156-158)
[...] prices cannot simply be derived and calculated from labour values, but depend on the politics of class struggle. [...]
draws on Jacques Bidet in Exploring Marx's Capital
[...] mentions that social network markets may have hubs and be dominated by elites, but this analysis is not systematically connected to power inequalities in society. It rather seems that Hartley assumes that such markets are nonetheless a realm of democracy because many have communicative tools available that can, if they are lucky and hard-working, enable them to become part of this elite, at least for a short time. This logic is at the heart of neo-liberalism's stress on performance, individualism and personal responsibility for success, failures and downfall. [...]
criticising John Hartley's Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies
[...] For Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1974, 4), the media are organizations that "produce and distribute commodities", are means for distributing advertisements and also have an "ideological dimension" by disseminating "ideas about economic and political structures". Murdock (1978, 469) stressed in the Blindspot Debate that there are non-advertising based culture industries (like popular culture) that sell "explanations of social order and structured inequality" and "work with and through ideology--selling the system" [...]
- capital accumulation in the media industry;
- advertising, public relations and sales promotion for other industries;
- legitimization of domination and ideological manipulation;
- reproduction, regeneration and qualification of labour-power.
Horst Holzer and Manfred Knoche (in different books)
Media content would be "an inducement (gift, bribe or 'Free lunch') to recruit potential members of the audience and to maintain their loyal attention" (Smythe 1977a, 5). Smythe (1977a; 1981, 22-51) introduced the notion of the audience commodity for analysing media adveritsement models, in which the audience is sold as a commodity to advertisers: "Because audience power is produced, sold, purchased and consumed, it commands a price and is a commodity. [. . .] You audience members contribute your unpaid work time and in exchange you receive the program material and the explicit advertisements" (Smythe 1981, 26, 233) Audience "work to market [. . .] things to themselves" (ibid., 4) The "main function of the mass media [. . .] is to produce audiences prepared to be dutiful consumers" (Smythe 1994, 250) [...]
[...] Internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter provide access to means of communication without selling access or content as commodity, yet they do not stand outside the commodity form, but rather commodify users' data. In return for the commodification of data, Facebook and Twitter provide a means of communication to their users. These means could be considered as being in-kind goods provided as return for the users granting the companies the possibility to access and commodify personal data. [...] users on Facebook and Twitter do not receive a universal medium of exchange, but rather one specific means of communication. By giving users access to their platforms, Facebook and Twitter do not provide general means of survival, but instead access to a particular means of communication whose use serves their own profit interests. This is not to say that I argue for payments to users of corporate Internet platforms that are advertising-financed. I rather argue for the creation of non-commercial non-profit alternatives that altogether escape, sublate and struggle against the commodity form.
glad to see he sidesteps the Jaron Lanier trap, but what does he propose should happen to FB/Twitter as they are now?
[...] for being able to drink the Coke one has to pay money so that Coca-Cola realizes monetary profit. The consumption does not directly create value for the company. On Facebook and Twitter, the consumption process of the service entails all online communication and usage online. All of this time is not only reproduction time (i.e. time for the reproduction of labour-power), but at the same time labour time that produces data commodities that are offered by Facebook and Twitter for sale to advertising clients. In the consumption process, the users do not just reproduce their labour-power but produce commodities. So on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, all consumption time is commodity production time.
[...] Whereas wage labour is coerced by the threat of physical violence (the threat is death because of the lack of being able to purchase and consume goods), audience labour is coerced by ideological violence (the threat is to have fewer social contacts because of missing information from the media and missing communication capacities that are needed for sustaining social relations). Audiences are under the ideological control of capitalists who possess control over the means of communication. If for example people stop using Facebook and social networking sites, they may miss certain social contact opportunities. They can refuse to become a Facebook worker, just like an employee can refuse to work for a wage, but they may as a consequence suffer social disadvantages in society. Commercial media coerce individuals to use them. The more monopoly power they possess, the easier it gets to exert this coercion over media consumers and users.
in response to Brett Caraway's claim that audiences are not commodities (2011)
for diss: cite this to say people CAN't boycott
[...] Smythe does not celebrate audiences as always rebelling and does not argue for social-democratic reformism that tolerates exploitation and misery. His analysis rather implies the need for the overthrow of capitalism in order to humanize society and the overthrow of the capitalist media system in order to humanize the media.